Someone in our local MUG pointed out that every time you copy a file to a Zip disk in 10.1.5, the date changes. She tried to reformat the disk using Iomega Tools, but it did not solve the problem. She talked to Apple and Iomega Tech support and no one she talked to had heard of this. I tested it and sure enough, the modified date is set back one hour every time you copy a file to the disk.

After doing some testing, I figured out that if you reformat the disc with Apple's OS X Disk Utility (the one they bundled with the OS), the problem is solved.

Speaking of zip drive oddities, I haven't had a chance to test this for a mac, however I do recall that Win based zip disks have a limit to the number of files that can be in the root directory. It was odd to see your zip drive full with less than 10 mb on it. Moving the files to a folder allowed me to fill it. I wonder if this limitation also is on DOS formatted Zip disks used on a mac.

The limit to the number of files in the root directory goes all the way back to DOS on the PCs. If I remember correctly, originally, DOS (or more precisely, FAT) wouldn't allow more than 128 entries in the root directory. It was actually less once you accounted for the volume name and such.

This limit existed since in FAT, the root directory is a fixed size and at a fixed location on the disk. Since subdirectories existed out on the disk itself, they could be arbitrarily large. Because of the nature of the FAT file system, this limit existed not only on floppy disks, but also on hard drives. I'm not sure when the limit was raised or removed, but I ran into it more than once.

The limit was 'removed' with FAT32 (available in Win95 OSR2, Win98 and all newer versions).

If the disk formatted for FAT or FAT32? It's likely formatted as FAT because I think FAT32 has a minimum size of ~500MB. You might be able to override that but by default that's what happens (from memory at least).